This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to advertising based on user trends in an online system.
In recent years, online systems, such as social networking systems, have enabled users to share their interests and preferences for real-world concepts, such as their favorite restaurants, bars, movies, musicians, celebrities, soft drinks, hobbies, sports teams, and activities. Users have also shared their current interests by sharing their current locations at real-world venues, such as coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and clubs. Tools have been designed to create nodes in social networking systems representing web pages and external systems that embody these real-world concepts on different domains external to the social networking system, such as products, venues, brands, and websites.
At the same time, users of social networking systems have shared information about their interests and current locations, created plans at venues by generating events, and engaged with other users of the social networking systems by expressing their interests in these concepts on web pages on different domains external to the social networking system. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing interests in sports, music, movies, and the like. Social networking systems have lacked tools to enable advertisers of products to utilize user trends in conjunction with their advertisements.
Specifically, the information available on social networking systems about users' interests and current locations has not been analyzed to predict user trends for use with advertisements. Information about users' trends based on a previous history of user behavior, including a viewing user's connections' trends, is very valuable to advertisers that seek to influence users to click on ads, drive traffic, and increase engagement with products, brands, venues, and the like. However, existing systems have not provided efficient mechanisms of using user trends for targeting advertisements.